I'm a semiconductor analyst with a long history in the industry, having worked at major semiconductor manufacturers (Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon) and analyzed the market as one of its most visible analysts at Dataquest, Gartner, and Objective Analysis. I have a reputation as a prolific writer, frequent speaker, and deep technologist, yet I take pride in removing the veil of obscurity from this fascinating technology and marketplace. My credentials include a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. I am a "Leader" (top 4%) with the Gerson Lehrman Group's Councils of Experts, an author and patent holder in semiconductor technology.

Looking into the Far Future of Chips

Every February the best and brightest researchers of the semiconductor industry converge on San Francisco to share their new developments in chip technology at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). As I attend a presentation I like to wonder just how astronomical the average IQ is of the attendees in the room.

This year, in celebration of the 60th anniversary of this conference, Cal Tech professor emeritus Carver mead was asked to present a keynote. The abstract put the topic of his speech concisely: “What’s next?”

For those who have not heard of him, Dr Mead has been teaching the brilliant young minds at Cal Tech for 40 years now, and is considered one of the world’s masters of quantum physic, especially as it applies to semiconductors. He explained to the audience that when Intel‘s Gordon Moore (of the famous “Moore’s Law”) came to him in 1967 asking for Mead to predict the scaling limits of semiconductor technology he replied, after careful evaluation, that current methods would work down to process geometries of 150 nanometers (billionths of a meter.) At the time this was one hundredth the size anticipated by the prevailing wisdom, and it would support nearly ten thousand times as many transistors as was then considered the limit.

This was all based on a simple insight: The behavior of the electron was dictated by the wave function rather than particle physics. He then went on to explain how those who considered practical physics from new perspectives had a way of taking science and its application beyond the limits of what standard approaches found to be possible.

Since that time, he said, quantum mechanics, optics, and other disciplines have matured to support developments far beyond Mead’s 1967 projection to the point that devices are now being mass-produced at 20nm geometries, and processes as small as 14nm, 1/10th the limit he anticipated, are about to be phased into production.

He pointed out that established methods and respected leaders in those methods often disbelieved new notions that didn’t follow their line of thought. He related a story of how Charlie Townes, father of the laser, brought his ideas before renowned physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg who both told him: “You just don’t seem to understand how quantum mechanics works.” (As I write this Google is commemorating the 540th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, another radical thinker, who found that the earth rotates around the sun, rather than vice versa.)

Mead then explained that the revolution that is commonly said to have happened in physics 100 years ago was not yet finished – he said we might only be stuck about 1/4 of the way there. He said that we need to finish the revolution, that we need to treat electron wave functions as real wave functions, that we need to understand in an intuitive way how quantum mechanics really works, and that we have to find a way to pass that knowledge to the next generation without it being buried in complex math & “gobbledygook.”

Mead’s goal is to continue to strive in that direction to help develop a way of thinking that will be vastly more intuitive and vastly more complete.

I left the presentation awestruck, with new faith in the continuing ability of semiconductor researchers to push the technology ahead far beyond currently-anticipated limits.

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Nobody really knows when we will run out of steam. If they tell you they do, then ask them the same question in a couple of years and see how the answer changes.

Today we are moving to vertical structures for logic. DRAM did that almost 20 years ago. If you can’t shrink across the face of the chip, then go vertical, making small horizontal areas become large as a result.

As for lithography – the art of making the features on the chip, we are going to move from 190nm light (which can somehow be coaxed into creating 20nm NAND flash) to 13nm “Deep UV” (a kinder/gentler way to say X-rays.) If 190nm light can be used to make 20nm features, then what can 13nm light be used to create? It boggles the mind!